One of Iraq's Christians chased out of her historic homeland quietly prayed the rosary as a bishop who traveled halfway around the world to meet her and others displaced celebrated Mass for them.

"It's a journey of encountering God, the poor and the dispossessed," Bishop Oscar Cantu, chairman of the Committee on International Justice and Peace of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told the gathering in this predominantly Christian enclave in Irbil, capital of the northern Kurdistan region.

Iraqi Christian refugees braved temperatures as high as 122 degrees to demand that the United Nations intervene to protect them from persecution by Islamist militants.

Sahar Mansour, a Chaldean Catholic who fled Mosul, Iraq, in June, told Catholic News Service by email that she saw some of the demonstrators faint in the heat as they marched from their refugee camp in Ankawa to the U.N. base in Irbil.